Even more care is required when working on a marble kitchen counter or when you have a marble island. However, it’s worth the extra care considering how beautiful such a kitchen looks.

For those instances where a widely open floor plan just doesn’t make sense or look well, it’s certainly not a bad idea to incorporate some sort of design elements that will resemble walls for you. Just be sure that they lean more toward Swiss cheese (plenty of visual “holes” and gaps) than toward a thick slice of cheddar. Leaving the top third of the vertical plane empty also helps to maintain a feeling of openness while still defining the smaller spaces.

Before we jump in to talking about the pros and cons of open floor plans, it might be a good idea to talk about what this means, or in other words to define open. Open, in this instance, describes the layout of a larger space that functions as multiple rooms or functionalities within that single (larger) living space. The most common form of open floor plan in today’s homes includes a combination of kitchen, dining room, and living room all open to each other within a single “great room”.